Don’t Try to Save Money On Food.

March 13th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under • by admin

Personal finance has two primary aspects. The first part is the finance part that deals with mathematics, accounting, and financial services. The second part is the “personal” part, which is actually much more important than all of the head knowledge in the world about complex mathematical equations and balance sheets. This is the part of controlling yourself from making impulsive purchases and doing the things that you tell yourself you are going to do. Making a plan to be financially successful is easy, actually executing it an implementing it is the hard part.

When we’re first starting to try to do smarter things with money, we generally look at all of our expenses and try to look at we can spend less money on. We look for problem areas that we’re spending too much money on, and one of the first things that most people think they should try to spend less money on is food. Do a Google Blog Search for saving money on food, and you’ll see what I mean. Spending too much money on food is a problem area for most people, because most of us go to the grocery store without a list and eat out as we please, but it’s not the area that you should attack first.

Mathematically it makes a lot of sense to try to be more economical with our food right away, but psychologically it will cause your financial plan to not work. When it comes to our money, the psychology of our plan has to work just as well as the mathematics. When try to set ourselves a frugal grocery and going out to eat budget, we make ourselves think that we can spend a lot less than we actually do. We cut ourselves back to next to nothing and think we’ll be okay with it.

Of course it doesn’t work like that. We cut ourselves back to our extremely frugal food budget, try to do it, but then we begin to miss all of the foods that we can no longer afford. Our decisions move from logic to emotion, and we begin making emotional purchasing decisions and end up spending a lot more money on food than we had wanted.

Instead of having those delicious Lean Cuisine Chicken Panini’s that we love so much but are $3.00 a piece, we have to settle for mediocre Banquet dinners because they’re only $1.00 a piece, but they really aren’t that great. We crave good food, and then end up going out to a restaurant and getting some decent food on a regular basis, making our budgets not work.

After we realize that our frugal food budget doesn’t seem to work, a lot of us have the tendency to just give up on our attempts to be fiscally responsible and go back to living pay-check to pay-check and spending as we please. We decry the idea of using a budget as impossible, and don’t give it a second thought.

Don’t worry, budgets do work, and you can be financially successful. The key is to ease into it and start in areas that are easier to cut back in. Food is one of the last things you should try to cut down because it’s so emotionally and physically based. You can easily buy one less book a month from Amazon or cut back on the number of times you go out to the movies, but food is a whole nothing manner. After you are successful in spending less money in other areas of your life, then you can consider cutting back slightly on your food budget.

Remember that psychology is just important as mathematics when trying to be frugal with your expenses. It looks nice on paper, but reality is an entirely different matter. Cut back where you can, but do it realistically and don’t start with your grocery and eating out categories.